Gluten-free Gingersnaps

A few weeks ago I wrote an article about sorghum syrup for The Jewish Week and mentioned that this sweetener (which was very popular before cheap, refined sugar came along) was gluten-free. 

But then I gave a recipe for sorghum-sweetened gingersnaps and unfortunately the cookies were not gluten-free.

That was a mistake! 

So here it is, a completely gluten-free recipe for gingersnaps. I like these even better than the original recipe. They are somewhat softer that regular gingersnaps.

Gluten-free Gingersnaps

3/4 cup vegetable shortening

1/4 cup coconut oil

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1/4 cup sorghum syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup Bob’s Red Mill gluten-free flour

3/4 cup coconut flour

1/4 cup quinoa flour

1 tablespoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

3/4 teaspoon ground ginger

3/4 teaspoon ground cloves

1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg

2 tablespoons sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a cookie sheet. Combine the shortening, coconut oil and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer and beat at medium speed until well combined. Add the egg, sorghum syrup and vanilla extract and beat until well blended. Add the gluten-free flour, coconut flour and quinoa flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, cloves and nutmeg and beat until the dough is well blended, smooth and uniform in color. Scoop mounded tablespoons of the dough and place them on the prepared cookie sheet, leaving an inch space between each piece (you will have to repeat or use several cookie sheets). Sprinkle the dough lightly with sugar. Bake the cookies for about 12 minutes or until the cookies have spread and are flat and crispy, with lines on the surface.

Makes about 60

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

I’ve been thinking about finger foods lately. The stuff of wedding cocktail hours, Superbowl parties and so on. There are many that I love and could eat any time, for any occasion. Fancy ones like smoked salmon Napoleons with Meyer lemon and caviar creme fraiche. And good old goodies like franks-in-blankets.

What’s not to like? Most of the time I fill up on the finger foods and don’t leave much room for the rest and that suits me just fine.

But honestly folks, when I started thinking about which finger food I like best, which I crave most often, which I would pick first before anything else, I realized it’s not any of the ones I mentioned. Not even potato puffs or goat cheese and caramelized onion bruschetta.

It’s the cookies.

Fannies, Grand Finale cookies, gingersnaps, peanut butter cookies, frozen dough cookies, Hello Dollys, Orange Marmalade cookies, Honey-Oat Granola Bars. Or old-fashioned Oatmeal Raisin cookies.

Which is why I blog about cookies so often.

Oatmeal Raisin Cookies

10 tablespoons unsalted butter

3/4 cup sugar

3/4 cup brown sugar

2 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanila extract

1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups quick oats

1 cup raisins

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a cookie sheet. In the bowl of an electric mixer set at medium speed, cream the butter and sugar together for a minute or so until creamy. Add the brown sugar and blend it in thoroughly. Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract. Add the flour, cinnamon, baking soda and salt and beat until the ingredients are well blended. Stir in the oats and raisins. Drop mounded tablespoons of the mixture onto the cookie sheet, leaving some space between each lump of dough. Bake the cookies for about 15 minutes or until lightly browned. Repeat with remaining dough. Makes about 42-48

Peanut Butter Cookies

July 4th brings out the all-American food fest. You know, hot dogs, hamburgers, cole slaw, potato salad and so on. Everybody’s cooking up a storm.

My own American favorite: Peanut Butter Cookies. First brought to the country’s attention by George Washington Carver (1864-1943), Tuskegee Institute’s famous teacher and promoter of the peanut crop. He apparently included some recipes for peanut-based cookies in a bulletin he put together early on.

Have you ever wondered why peanut butter cookies always have criss-cross fork marks on top?

It’s because the dough is dense and doesn’t spread easily. The fork flattens the cookie so it bakes evenly and the outside has a bigger surface area for crisping.

I guess you could roll the dough and cut out peanut butter cookies and they would bake just as well.

But then they wouldn’t be American Peanut Butter Cookies, would they?

Here’s my mother’s recipe. It doesn’t get better than these. They are compellingly sweet and salty at the same time, an old-fashioned taste that peanut butter cookie aficionados understood and loved long before sea-salted caramels came along.

My Mom always made these with Skippy peanut butter. I’ve made them with all other kinds, commercial brands and organic-bulk.

Skippy’s the best there is for these.

Peanut Butter Cookies

2-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1 cup white sugar

1 cup packed brown sugar

1 cup peanut butter

1 cup vegetable shortening

2 large eggs

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a cookie sheet. Combine the flour, baking soda, salt, white sugar and brown sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer (or use a handheld mixer and large bowl) and mix at medium speed for about 1 minute or until the mixture is uniform and the ingredients are evenly distributed. Add the peanut butter, shortening and eggs and beat the mixture for about 2 minutes, starting at low speed then gradually switching to medium until a uniform dough forms. Take off pieces of dough and shape them into balls about 1-1/2 inches in diameter. Flatten the balls between your palms. Place the cookies on the prepared sheet, leaving an inch of space between them. Press the top of each cookie with the flat, bottom side of a fork to make a crisscross design on top of each cookie. Bake for 16-20 minutes or until the cookies are richly browned and crispy. You can freeze these cookies for 6 months.

Makes about 8 dozen

Saint Cupcake’s Brownie Cookies

Saint Cupcake’s Chocolate Cookies

Why bother with any other recipe this Valentine’s Day? That’s what I realized. These cookies, which I baked last weekend, were so good that my husband devoured almost the entire batch. He did leave some for a couple of workmen who happened to be at our house making some repairs on the oven. But I am about to make another batch. Or two. So I know I will have some available.

I got the recipe from Sprinklefingers, a tumblr blog I follow. The woman who writes the Sprinklefingers blog is an energetic, interesting person who lives in Portland, Oregon, and has this fabulous bakery called Saint Cupcake (actually there are two bakeries now). I say fabulous because the photos and the menu of goodies looks fabulous. I’ve never been there or met the woman, Jami Curl, who owns it and writes the blog. The place and the woman are clear across the country from me.

But I do know that all the posts are interesting and the recipes wonderful.

So the other day I tried her recipe for Chocolate Brownie Cookies. All I can say is: these are not to be missed. The cookies are awesome. Perfect for Valentine’s Day. Or any other day actually.

I made one batch of the larger cookies, one batch of the smaller. I prefer the smaller (then you don’t feel so guilty eating two).

I changed the way Jami’s recipe is written to conform to the way I write recipes, so maybe I should say it is adapted. But the ingredients and instructions are exactly the same. Maybe I should have this blurb like they do on TV when they say a movie has been edited to be formatted for your TV screen.

Saint Cupcake’s Brownie Cookies

• 4 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces

• 12 ounces semisweet chocolate

• 1/3 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/4 teaspoon salt

• 1/4 teaspoon baking powder

• 2 large eggs plus one large egg yolk

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 1/4 cup packed brown sugar

• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper (or grease the sheet lightly). Melt the butter and chocolate together in the top part of a double boiler. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside to let ingredients cool. Sift the flour, salt and baking powder together in a bowl and set aside. Beat the eggs, egg yolk, sugar and brown sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer set at medium speed until well blended, about 5 minutes. Fold the cooled chocolate mixture into the egg mixture until thoroughly blended. Add the flour mixture and vanilla and blend them in thoroughly. Let the batter rest for 10 minutes. Use a 2-ounce scoop to form a rounded mound and place on the prepared cookie sheet. Leave space between the cookies for expansion. Bake for 15-17 minutes. OR, use a smaller (one-ounce scoop) and bake for about 10-12 minutes. Cookies should be cracked, with moist looking ingredients inside the cracks.

Frozen Dough Foldover Cookies

I don’t usually talk so much about desserts, at least not as a daily matter, but I looked back at my posts this week and noticed they were all sugar-loaded.

Is my body telling me something?

I did just call my dentist for an appointment …

Somehow it was dessert week at any rate, starting with Tangerine Tart and then Spice Cake. Yesterday I mentioned that it would have been my mom’s 100th birthday and I had a triumphant breakthrough with a cookie-cake recipe of hers (Nut Roll) I could never get right until now. And during the week, thinking I might not do the Nut Roll well enough to blog about it, I made some of my mom’s foldover frozen dough cookies. The ones I would have written about if not the Nut Roll.

I haven’t made these cookies in a while. All I can say is that the recipe yielded 84 cookies. I gave 4 away. There are 6 left.

So guess how many cookies Ed and I ate, just the two of us?

They are quite delicious is all I can say.

Frozen Dough Foldover Cookies

1-1/3 cups all-purpose flour, approximately

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 pound unsalted butter

1 cup dairy sour cream

1 large egg white

lekvar (prune and apricot), apple or pumpkin butter or jam

Place the flour and salt in the bowl of an electric mixer and mix briefly to add the salt. Add the butter in chunks and mix on low-medium for a minute or so until the mixture is crumbly. Add the sour cream. Mix until a smooth dough has formed. It might be slightly sticky. If very sticky add a tablespoon more of flour. Knead the dough on a well-floured surface and shape into a cylinder. Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least 8 hours. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Using small chunks of dough at a time, roll the dough thin (about 1/16th-inch) and cut into 2-inch squares. Place some lekvar in the middle. Bring up opposite sides corner points of the dough to the middle and press to seal the dough. Place the cookies on a lightly greased cookie sheet. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. Brush the tops of the cookies with some egg white. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until lightly browned.

Makes about 7 dozen

Manischewitz Chanuka House

If you think Manischewitz is all old school, with tried and true stuff like matzos and gefilte fish, you wouldn’t be wrong. But this company, born in 1888 (will celebrate its 125th birthday next year!), has got its act in the 21st century too.

Like so many other manufacturers who now offer thousands of products for kosher home cooks whose culinary aspirations go beyond traditional, Manischewitz has a bunch of new items, like Dark Chocolate Covered Potato Chips, Almond Butter Spread, Chocolate Hazelnut Spread, Moroccan Roasted Vegetables, and others.

And for the kids, there’s the new Chanuka kits, a sort of kosher take on the seasonal gingerbread house. There are two kinds: a Chanuka Sugar Cookie Decorating Kit (4 vanilla cookies with Hanukkah (or Chanuka) themes, plus icing, beads and sprinkles; and a second, more elaborate Chanuka House Decorating Kit with all the goodies needed to make a holiday cookie house, decorated with icing and sugary things all over.

In addition, the company is sponsoring a contest (grand prize $500) — for folks who actually make one of the vanilla cookie houses, creating the design of their desire. It’s a terrific and sweet project for kids. You can get the entry rules and information here.

But it’s more than just a contest. You don’t have to enter (entering involves taking a photo of the finished project). Cooking and crafting with kids can be a lot of fun. A nice start to the holiday season.

Enjoy!

Gluten-Free Hello Dolly Cookies

Yes, yes, yesterday I was all about how to keep the pounds off during the holiday season and then I went and baked some Hello Dolly Bars.

But I do have a good excuse. First, I bake for a bi-monthly Tea our local Hadassah group hosts for cancer patients and their caregivers at Stamford Hospital, so these will NOT wind up in my freezer where they will tempt me (or Ed).

Second, I needed to bake some gluten-free cookies and experimented with these well-known bar cookies. Instead of using graham crackers I substituted almond meal and it worked out really well.

I confess — I did taste! But as I mentioned yesterday, just a taste, not two or three pieces.

I have no idea why these are called Hello Dolly Bars. I know people who call them Magic Bars or 7-Layer Bars. Some people have said the name has something to do with the Broadway musical, “Hello Dolly,” which opened in 1964, but recipes for similar cookies were around before then, so I don’t think so.

You can use this recipe with the usual graham cracker crumbs (1-1/2 cups instead of the 2 cups of almond meal). I have also made them with chocolate cookie crumbs. Also, I use almonds because my daughter is allergic to walnuts and pecans, but you can use those. Or cashews.

Gluten-Free Hello Dolly Cookies

2 cups very finely ground almonds or almond meal

1/2 cup melted butter

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 cup chopped nuts

1 cup chocolate chips

1-1/3 cups packaged coconut shreds

14-15 ounce can condensed milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Mix the ground almonds and melted butter together and press into the bottom of a 9”x13” baking pan. Sprinkle the surface with the cinnamon. Scatter the nuts and chocolate chips evenly on top. Scatter the coconut evenly on top. Pour the milk gradually over the entire surface to evenly cover as much as possible. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool in the pan. Cut into 36 bars. Makes 36

Orange Marmalade Cookies

Orange Marmalade Cookies

A lot of people I know laugh at me because I always have a freezer packed with food. It’s that old “just in case company comes” mentality I learned from my mother.

Or maybe it’s a “just in case” a hurricane comes and you don’t have power for 6 days and not only do you need to eat up food that would otherwise spoil, you also want something sweet and delicious as a sort of consolation for not having light, heat, hot water and so on.

So I was really happy that my “just in case” packed freezer had some cookies. Among them, these oat-based bars, topped with crispy edged orange marmalade and stuffed with lots of chopped dried fruit.

I still have some left over, and that’s good because they will make for excellent nibbling on election night.

Orange Marmalade Cookies

• 1-1/2 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 teaspoon baking powder

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1-1/2 cups quick cooking oats

• 1 cup brown sugar

• 3/4 cup butter or margarine

• 1/2 cup chopped dried apricots

• 1/2 cup chopped dates

• 1/4 cup dried cranberries

• 13-14 ounce jar orange marmalade (1-1/2 cups)

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Lightly grease a 9”x13” cake pan. Mix the flour, baking powder and salt together in a bowl. Add the oats and brown sugar and mix the ingredients thoroughly to distribute them evenly. Cut the butter into chunks and work into the dry ingredients (with fingers or process on pulse in a food processor) until the butter is completely mixed in and the mixture looks crumbly. Mix in the apricots, dates and cranberries. Press the mixture evenly inside the prepared pan. Spread the marmalade evenly on top. Bake for 35-40 minutes or until golden brown. Let cool in the pan. Cut into bars or squares.

Makes 24-36

Cranberry-Oat-Chocolate Chip Honey Bars

Here I am, snug in my home office, looking out the window at the rain and waiting for Hurricane Sandy. It’s, well, I am thinking, kind of silly to be waiting for the power to fail.

I feel like the hilarious Dorothy Parker waiting for the telephone call from her boyfriend.

Which never comes of course.

So, maybe the power won’t go out?

But at least, while waiting, I did a couple of useful things like read some of my book (In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson) and get rid of that awful pile of papers on my desk, waiting to be filed.

And I also made Cranberry-Oat-Chocolate Chip Honey Bars because I read that it was National Oatmeal Day. And of course I know that cookies are not exactly oatmeal, but these do have oats in them. So, here’s the recipe in celebration of National Oatmeal Day and also Ed and I will have some more goodies when (if) the power goes out.

Cranberry-Oat-Chocolate Chip Honey Bars

• 2 cups rolled oats

• 1/2 cup chopped almonds

• 6 tablespoons vegetable oil

• 1/2 cup honey

• 1/3 cup maple syrup

• 1/4 cup brown sugar

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

• 1 cup dried cranberries

• 3/4 cup chocolate chips

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Lightly grease a 9-inch square cake pan, line the pan with parchment paper, leaving an overhang (to pull the cookies out after baking) of about 3-inches on each side. Lightly grease the paper. Place the oats and almonds on a cookie sheet and bake for about 4 minutes, stirring once or twice, or until the oats and almonds are lightly toasted and aromatic. Remove from the oven. In a medium saucepan, combine the vegetable oil, honey, maple syrup, brown sugar and salt and cook, stirring frequently for 2-3 minutes or until hot and smooth. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in the oat mixture. Stir in the cinnamon and cranberries. Let cool. Stir in the chocolate chips. Spoon the mixture into the prepared pan. Bake for 25-30 minutes or until lightly browned. Let cool. Remove by pulling the overhanging paper. Lift out, place on a cutting board and cut into 16-24 pieces.

Makes 16-24 cookies

Fanny's or Fannies or Just Butter Cookies

I will watch the presidential debate tonight. Because I am completely engaged in this election, following it with more than the usual interest. And anyway, I think it is important to listen to what the candidates have to say.

But I think this particular debate is going to be a nail biter. Every word, every gesture, every tic and drop of perspiration, every hanky, every downward look looms large.

Is that because we have stopped listening to what they are really saying and let punditry and distractions influence us?

Is it because we really don’t trust anything any politician says so we are guided by body language?

In any event, as I said, this is going to be a nail biter. Or at least a big munchtime. I’ll probably nibble excessively.

I need popcorn.

And cookies to get me through the night.

These:

Mom’s Butter Cookies

• 1/2 pound unsalted butter

• 1/2 cup sugar

• 2 cups all-purpose flour

• 2 large egg yolks

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• jam, preserves or lekvar (about 1/2 cup)

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Combine the butter and sugar in the bowl of an electric mixer set at medium speed. When the mixture is well blended, beat in the flour, egg yolks, salt and vanilla extract. Mix until the dough is a uniform color. Take off small pieces of dough and shape them into balls about 1-inch in diameter. Flatten the balls and press the center to make an indentation. Place the cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet leaving a small amount of space between each cookie. Fill the indentation with jam, preserves or lekvar. Bake about 25 minutes or until golden brown.

Makes about 60